Why Is Israel On a Settlement-Construction Spree?

By Michael Koplow

The Israeli prime
minister's controversial plans, condemned around the world, are about more than
just punishing the Palestinians.

A construction site in Gilo, on land Israel captured in 1967 and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality, on January 16, 2011. (Baz Ratner/Reuters)

Over the past few weeks, the Israeli government has been on
a building spree. First came word that planning and
zoning would begin for E1, a controversial move that would further encircle
East Jerusalem with settlements -- cutting off from the West Bank the part of
the city Palestinians demand to be the capital of their future state. As part
of the same announcement, Israel said that it was going to build more housing
in other parts of the West Bank as well.

This week, the government
approved 1500 new housing units in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood in East Jerusalem
-- the same housing units whose initial announcement in 2010 during Vice
President Biden's visit to Israel caused a temporary rift between the United
States and Israel and Hilary Clinton's chewing-out of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Interior Ministry and the Jerusalem Local Committee are
also expected to approve plans to build in Givat Hamatos and Gilo this week,
both of which are new Jerusalem neighborhoods that are also across the 1967
armistice line that divides East and West Jerusalem.

This is all taking place despite enormous pressure and
condemnation from Western countries, who are not happy with the escalation of
Israeli plans to expand settlements or to build up Jerusalem neighborhoods that
challenge the viability of a future Palestinian state. Britain, France, Germany,
and Portugal are about to formally
condemn Israel over its East Jerusalem building plans, and the 14 non-American
members of the United Nations Security Council are going
to do the same. Even the United States seems to have lost
its usual patience with the Israeli government, deeming the new building
announcements part of a "pattern of provocative action" that endangers the
peace process and the two-state solution. Israel seems hell-bent on isolating
itself over the settlement issue, and appears determined to move ahead with
plans for both the West Bank and East Jerusalem no matter the cost.

It is easy to chalk this up to Israel's fury with the
Palestinian Authority's statehood bid at the United Nations, as the E1
announcement came the day after the vote, amidst stated determination on
Israel's part to punish the Palestinians for pursuing unilateral moves outside
of the Oslo framework. "We felt
if the Palestinians were taking unilateral action in the UN, we had to also
send the message that we could take unilateral actions," Israeli ambassador to
the US Michael Oren said
this week, making the connection
explicit.

Yet, this does not account for the scope of the recent
Israeli announcements, or for the seeming recklessness of drawing real anger
and censure from Israel's Western allies immediately following American and EU
support during Operation Pillar of Cloud in Gaza. There is indeed something
else going on here, and it has nothing to do with the Palestinians and
everything to do with the political jockeying taking place on the right of
Israel's political spectrum before Israelis go to the polls on January 22 to
elect their next government.

When Netanyahu created the joint list between Likud and
Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu, the thinking
behind the move was to create a right-wing monolith that would not only
handily win the election, but also present rightwing voters without a real
alternative. Not only was the plan to keep Likud and Yisrael Beiteinu voters,
but to recapture the erstwhile Likud voters who had cast their ballots for
Kadima in the past two elections and would now, with Kadima's imminent
disappearance, have nowhere else to go.

For Netanyahu though, the joint list was also about
eliminating any challenges to him from his right flank. Following the debacle of
his short-lived unity government with Kadima and the call for early elections after
the fighting and unresolved impasse over Haredi and Arab military service,
Netanyahu was afraid that Lieberman was going to outflank him on the right by
appealing to nationalist issues. Netanyahu assumed that by co-opting Lieberman,
he would have no real rightwing challengers sniping at him.

Instead, it turns out that Netanyahu is dealing with both
external and internal challenges from the right. First is Naftali Bennett's
nationalist Habayit Hayehudi (Jewish Home) party, which has siphoned off enough
voters from Likud that it is now polling
as the third largest party behind only Likud-Beiteinu and Labor, likely to garner
at least 10-12 seats in the Knesset. Bennett, who used to be Netanyahu's chief
of staff, is confident enough that he has already been demanding that Netanyahu
drop Haredi parties from his next coalition and give security portfolios to aspiring
Habayit Hayehudi ministers.

Within his own party, the Likud primary created a list of
Knesset candidates that is the
most right-wing in Likud history and includes perennial Netanyahu
challenger Silvan Shalom in the fourth slot, as well as Netanyahu antagonist
and settler champion Moshe Feiglin, who was not even a Knesset member in the
current government. Feiglin, Danny Dannon, Ze'ev Elkin, Yariv Levin, and other
Likud members who will be MKs in the next Knesset are already wary of Netanyahu
and will be constantly pushing him to the right under the constant threat of
challenging his leadership of the party.

Netanyahu is now facing a scenario in which his rightwing
credentials are being challenged before the election in ways that he did not
expect. The easiest way for him to staunch the bleeding of voters to Habayit
Hayehudi and quiet the grumblings within Likud over his leadership is to back
settlements to the hilt; Netanyahu has taken this strategy and run with it.
Settlements are the most important issue for Israel's right wing, even above
forestalling negotiations with the Palestinians or confronting Iran.

Likud is at its heart a settler party, and Habayit Hayehudi
represents a fusion of settlements and nationalism. Given the predilections
within both parties, Netanyahu has little choice but to keep on pushing
settlement growth in the West Bank and continued building in East Jerusalem no
matter how much heat he takes from the United States, the EU, the UN, or anyone
else. As long as Netanyahu faces challenges from his right before the election,
nothing is going to deter the recent string of building announcements,
including continuing pressure from the West.

So while the Israeli government's recent spree of developing
neighborhoods and towns in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is certainly in
part a response to the Palestinian UN vote, focusing solely on that misses much
of the story. The churning taking place in Israel's right wing and the domestic
political calculus during this election season are driving the Netanyahu
government's policies that are causing so much angst in Washington and Turtle
Bay. As is so often the case in Israel, all politics is local.